Re: Airport insanity
Bill Stewart wrote... Unfortunately, the primary algorithm seems to work like this: - Somebody puts a name on some list because it seems like a good idea at the time, and there's no due process required. - Everybody copies lists from everybody else, with minimal attempt to track where the information comes from. - Database corruption propagates rapidly, so anybody who's on any list because of political corruption like Neo-Cointelpro stays there because of database corruption. And if we add local intelligence in the form of allowing airport screeners to act on their hunches, then there's one more step: Airport Screener didn't get her child-support check from the ex and as a result is saving her crack for lunchtime...frisks well-heeled and arguably spolied white-guy with a little 'tude who proceeds to give said screener some 'feedback'...Airport screener figures she'll brighten up her own morning and prevents said white-guy from flying: Hey, something told me this guy was trouble, so fire me and I'll work for Starbucks instead. One day, I may be willing to subscribe to the commonly held cypherpunk belief that any law from a government is basically a bad thing, but AFAIC we don't need to get that far yet. When laws boil down the decision-in-a-vacuum and whim of the enforcer, Break out the Zombie patriots. -TD _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Re: Airport insanity
James, I appreciate your valiant if futile effort to defend honorable militarism, but you appear not to understand that much of current US military doctrine is aimed at terrorizing enemy forces, en masse, into submission, not merely courageously killing each combatant, mano a mano. Carpet bombing, bunker-busting, cruise missles, stealth attacks, artillery barrages, and tactical and strategic attacks with overwhelming forces in multiples of the opposing force, the so-called shock and awe, are intended to demoralize and terrify the opposition including civilian supporters. These attacks require little or no courage to execute, for most are accomplished with stand-off or remote-controlled platforms, guided by long-radar, GPS, and satellites, systems operated by clean-uniformed technicians who don't bear personal arms, even take showers daily and watch TV of their carnage for entertainment. This contrasts with the special forces which do aim at small scale, precision killing, and which does require courage. Not much of that goes on, way too cheap for the military- industrial empire which treasures big iron, gigantic iron, humongous iron, unbelievably expensive metal, costing millions of dollars per kill, rather imaginary deaths in the Cold War manner. Don't mistake the language and literature of war for the real thing. You find yourself 100 yards from a bomb blast, and your organs go into shutdown from the concussion, yours vision blurs, your limbs won't function, you shit and piss your britches, then another bomb falls 50 yards away and blood squirts from ears eyes and gums due to air compression of your veins and arties, you flop senselessly out of control and try to cry for momma, no air in your lungs, skin turning red from heat, then a third bomb hits 25 yards away and your body begins to come apart from the blast or being scythed by shrapnel -- if your head doesn't leave the carcass, it'll be fried by the metal helmet, your skin will sizzle, boiling blood will spray out of all your orifices, but you'll not get to appreciate this sacrifice for your country, you'll be chatting with your maker, the bodybag team scraping you memorial into the barbage bag, heading for the flag-draped tube. Back in the control room which directed the friendly fire, the boys and girls are whooping at the bomb pattern, high-fiving and fist knocking at the perfect fit of thinking machine and killing machine, no risk to the comfy killers manning the mouses, just like the gameboys taught.
Re: Give peace a chance? NAH...
Tyler Durden wrote: So. Why don't we see terrorist attacks in Sweden, or Switzerland, or Belgium or any other country that doesn't have any military or Imperliast presence in the middle east? Is this merely a coincidence? What I strongly suspect is that if we were not dickin' around over there in their countries, the threat of terrorism on US soil would diminish to very nearly zero. In other words, we DO have a choice of peace, and our choice was to pass on it. TBH the UK *did* have a major terrorist threat for decades - because we were dicking around in *their* country :)
Re: Airport insanity
-- Thomas Shaddack: It isn't a problem for you until it happens to you. Who knows when being interested in anon e-cash will become a ground to blacklist *you*. James A. Donald: I know when it will happen. It will happen when people interested in anon ecash go on suicide missions. :-) Bill Stewart More likely, when anon ecash money-launderers start being accused of funding terrorist activities. When e-currency handlers (cambists) are accused of money laundering terrorist's money, the feds steal the money, but they do not obstruct them from travelling, or, surprisingly, even from doing business - well, perhaps not so surprisingly, for if they stopped them from doing business there would be nothing to steal. When the state uses repressive measures against those that seek to murder us, there is still a large gap between that and using repressive measures against everyone. We are not terrorists, we don't look like terrorists, we don't sound like terrorists. Indeed, the more visible real terrorists are, the less even Tim McViegh looks like a terrorist and the more he looks like a patriot. When people are under attack they are going to lash out, to kill and destroy. Lashing out an external enemy, real or imaginary, is a healthy substitute for lashing out at internal enemies. We do not have a choice of peace, merely a choice between war against external or internal enemies. Clearly, war against external enemies is less dangerous to freedom. War is dangerous to freedom, but we do not have a choice of peace. The question is where the war is to be fought - in America, or elsewhere. War within America will surely destroy freedom. What we need to fear is those that talk about the home front and internal security, those who claim that Christians are as big a threat as Muslims - or that black Muslims are as big a threat as Middle Eastern Muslims. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG cGrCJvmIhJnYLWO2RB3qmnqijcHlOOsA7iklRoZD 4Ar75eLN10XbfJw/mqPpGQeUW0SzMlz4CLrpHIeEe
Re: Airport insanity
At 12:18 PM 10/18/2004, James A. Donald wrote: http://washingtontimes.com/national/20041018-124854-2279r.htm : : Despite gaining their freedom by signing pledges to : : renounce violence, at least seven former prisoners : : of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have : : returned to terrorism, at times with deadly : : consequences. : : : : At least two are believed to have died in fighting : : in Afghanistan, and a third was recaptured during a : : raid of a suspected training camp in Afghanistan, : : Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman, said : : last week. Others are at large. : : Additional former detainees have expressed a desire : : to rejoin the fight, be it against U.N. peacekeepers : : in Afghanistan, Americans in Iraq or Russian : : soldiers in Chechnya. None of those things sound like terrorism to me, just basic military violence, though certainly the American and Russian militaries aren't the only ones engaging in terrorist activities in South Asia and some of these ~146 people may be among them. But most of the Warlord-vs-Warlord fighting in Afghanistan isn't terrorism, and most of the Iraqi Resistance isn't either, and I'd have expected that a staunch anti-communist like James wouldn't mind people shooting at Russian soldiers even though they're no longer Soviets. At 11:38 AM 10/18/2004, James A. Donald wrote: Tyler Durden Let's just state the obvious: September 11th occurred not because we had a few crazy Muslim fundamentalists out there that decided they hate our freedoms. The struck us because we've been fuckin' over a large swath of the Muslim (not only Arab) world for 100 years or so And the reason they are murdering Iraqi Christians, Filipinos, Ambionese and Timorese is? While the ones murdering Iraqi Christians may be doing it out of religious hatred as well as the perception that the Americans are running a Christian crusade against the Muslim world, the Indonesian invasions of their neighbors such as East Timor are just good old nationalist expansion - the US has been funding the Indonesian military for ~40 years because they're our Anti-Communist buddies, and who cares about their human rights records. You didn't expect that behaviour to stop just because there were no longer any Commies around, did you?
Re: Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money
--- begin forwarded text To: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money) From: Somebody at a Central Securities Depository :-) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 10:31:10 +0100 i buy the argument that transaction instantaneity is a solution to the identity theft problem - my cash in your hands, at the same time (now) as your goods in my hands, in a way that allows both of us to ensure we have got what we wanted. But there's a trade-off; I have to use money, not credit, now - your point about the buyer 'lending' the seller cash at 0% interest. I'm not sure how the system compensates for that. It seems to me it becomes a risk-cost trade-off for the individual: I can work out the cost to me of using real money not credit; then I know what I am paying to insure myself against identity theft. Of course I probably rely on the credit people covering me against a lot of the risk of identity theft, and I may not even pay them for that cost (if it is built into the APR they charge and I can avoid interest by paying off the card quickly)... so to me identity theft risk is almost costless. Why then would I choose to insure myself explicitly by using cash instead of credit? What is it that makes all the individuals start thinking about the best interests of the system (which should be cheaper without all these hidden insurance costs) instead of thinking about their own interests?! David R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/10/2004 15:52 To:John Kelsey [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject:Re: Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money) -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 9:49 AM -0400 10/12/04, John Kelsey wrote: Hmmm. I guess I don't see why this story supports that argument all that well. More like the straw that broke the camel's back, admittedly. A long time ago I came to the conclusion that the closer we get to transaction instantaneity, the less counterparty identity matters at all. That is, the fastest transaction we can think of is a cryptographically secure glop of bits that is issued by an entity who is responsible for the integrity of the transaction and the quality of assets that the bits represent. Blind signature notes work fine for a first-order approximation. In other words, an internet bearer transaction. In such a scenario, nobody *cares* who the counterparties are for two reasons. The first reason is existential: title to the asset has transferred instantaneously. There is *no* float. I have it now, so I don't *care* who you were, because, well, it's *mine* now. :-). Second, keeping an audit trail when the title is never in question is, in the best circumstances superfluous and expensive, and, in the worst, even dangerous for any of a number of security reasons, depending on the color of your adversary's hat, or the color your adversary thinks his hat is, or whatever. Keeping track of credit card numbers in a database is an extant problem, for instance, with a known, shall we say, market cost. We'll leave political seizure and other artifacts of totalitarianism to counted by the actuaries. Clearly, book entry systems where I can do transactions in your name and you are held liable for them are bad, but that's like looking at Windows 98's security flaws and deciding that x86 processors can't support good OS security. I'm walking out on a limb here, in light of what I said above, and saying that when there's *any* float in the process, your liability for identity theft increases with the float involved. Furthermore, book-entry transactions *require* float, somewhere. They are debt-dependent. Someone has to *borrow* money to effect a transaction. (In a bearer transaction, the shoe's on the other foot, the purchaser is *loaning* money, at zero interest, but that's what the buyer wants so the system compensates accordingly, but that's another story.) Because the purchaser has to borrow money to pay, and because you *cannot* wring the float out of a transaction (that is, you can get instantaneous execution, but the transaction clears and settles at a later date; 90 days is the maximum float time for a non-repudiated credit-card transaction, for instance), I claim that book-entry transactions will *always* be liable for identity theft. Put another way, remember Doug Barnes' famous quip that and then you go to jail is not an acceptable error handling step for a transnational internet transaction protocol. I would claim that enforcement of identity as a legal concept costs too much in the long run to be useful, and that the cheapest way to avoid the whole problem is to go to systems which not only don't require identity, but they don't even require book-entry *accounts* at all to function at the user level. Financial cryptography has had that technology for more than two decades now, so long
Re: Airport insanity
Damian Gerow I've had more than one comment about my ID photos that amount to basically: You look like you've just left a terrorist training camp. As Erma Bombeck wrote, by the time you look like your passport photo, it's time to come home from vacation. An extra couple of red-eye flights don't help, either. At 11:27 AM 10/16/2004, James A. Donald wrote: If you really look like the shoe bomber, then you should have to drive, or use public transport. James misspoke here - the only public air transport I'm aware of in the US is run by the military, and or if he meant that people who look like shaggy-haired Brits with real leather shoes should be banned from privately-run transportation systems like airplanes and Greyhound, that pretty much leaves Amtrack as the only long-distance transport option for civilians, since city and county busses normally don't go very far. At 11:27 AM 10/16/2004, James A. Donald wrote: Provided the number of people you throw off planes is rather small, I don't see the problem. Depends a lot on how high up the planes are when you throw them off... There's the concept of due process of law that the Bush administration isn't very familiar with that determines when you're Constitutionally permitted to deprive people of their liberties. At 11:38 AM 10/18/2004, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Personally, as a relatively frequent flyer, I worry much more about things like cutting corners of fuselage and engine maintenance and quality of fuel (and, perhaps even more, the quality of onboard coffee) than about bombers on board. Unfortunately, cutting the quality of the onboard coffee means that you're more likely to look like a shoe-bomber by the time the plane arrives. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Airport insanity
-- On 19 Oct 2004 at 14:46, John Young wrote: you appear not to understand that much of current US military doctrine is aimed at terrorizing enemy forces, en masse, into submission, not merely courageously killing each combatant, mano a mano. Carpet bombing, bunker-busting, cruise missles, stealth attacks, artillery barrages, and tactical and strategic attacks with overwhelming forces in multiples of the opposing force, the so-called shock and awe, are intended to demoralize and terrify the opposition including civilian supporters. These attacks require little or no courage to execute, for most are accomplished with stand-off or remote-controlled platforms, guided by long-radar, GPS, and satellites, systems operated by clean-uniformed technicians who don't bear personal arms, even take showers daily and watch TV of their carnage for entertainment. If only it were true. That is why I recommend readily achievable goals, like stealing the oil, rather than goals that require direct involvment mano a mano. But in reality, the US government is pursuing goals such as building democracy that require Americans to walk the streets of Baghdad, a daily exercise of tremendous courage. Here is my prescription for winning the war on terrorism We SHOULD rely on shock and awe, administered by men in white coats far from the scene. A number of governments are disturbingly tolerant of terror. Usually they are only tolerant of terror against their non Islamic subjects, and disapprove of external terror committed by their subjects against outsiders, but the two cannot readily be separated. One leads to the other. The US government should expose and condemn these objectionable practices, subvert moderately objectionable regimes, and annihilate more objectionable regimes. The pentagon should deprive moderately objectionable regimes of economic resources, by stealing their oil, destroying their water systems, and cutting off their trade and population movements with the outside world. Syria should suffer annihilation, Iran subversion, Sudan some combination of annihilation and subversion, Saudi Arabia and similar less objectionable regimes should suffer confiscation of oil, destruction of water resources, and loss of contact with the outside world. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG e1oHDIrpt6CyLSJ0viuvD+nsJlXpjVCUxG/FZL0R 4eteebtmUGC9WtT7zAMaOVdF81wmFCSz8fug2AQef
Re: Airport insanity..Ethnicity is Bullshit
-- Tyler Durden Let's just state the obvious: September 11th occurred not because we had a few crazy Muslim fundamentalists out there that decided they hate our freedoms. The struck us because we've been fuckin' over a large swath of the Muslim (not only Arab) world for 100 years or so James A. Donald: And the reason they are murdering Iraqi Christians, Filipinos, Ambionese and Timorese is? And I forgot to mention a hundred thousand or more Sudanese, not to mention that Al Quaeda murdered far more Afghans than Americans. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG U7+z5L2eeFW+S1IwpXSNX1hEyOCuQCcGDFWykNQj 4klCW0iUxAJl1ub0DnUbDZKbwXJdS70AuL86+gLTI
Re: Airport insanity
-- Tyler Durden Your statement was that the US took special care in avoiding harm to Muslims. In this case we have Muslims tortured at Guantanamo and now angry as hell. And you expected...what? I expected them to be KEPT in Guantanamo. Furthermore, they were not tortured, though they should have been. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wCUg52ZJNzaMD0ZPioMTruGISGd3DDwU6jUMELl/ 41LiTXyUsja0zJksTRtCgVaYxSideYIzzbGD/3Qq5
RE: Airport insanity
-- On 18 Oct 2004 at 13:35, John Young wrote: James is wired to be unempathetic about victims, as was McVeigh, as are fearless military and criminal killers, as are national leaders of a yellow stripe who never taste the bitter end of their exculpatory spin. What makes the wire work is that they do not believe that what they do unto others will be done to them. So you think our enemies should try to be even more savage and cruel than they already are? That would be difficult. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 8jFPc5YyznRSoFsz/euu3E71jE/C2JzYp7OIfB5b 4xNxnhSKG4pS9CinRKGV1bL4JQv8SATqhIxtUwoyy
[Humor] [TSCM-L] secret agent man!!! (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:02:53 -0700 From: A.Lizard [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [TSCM-L] secret agent man!!! Sad state of spying Intelligence vets are still musing over Michael Kostiw, whose reported shoplifting forced his withdrawal this month as the CIA's prospective executive director. But what dismays the spooks most isn't the ethics or the propriety of the case--it's that Kostiw had served as a case officer for 10 years and still couldn't manage to shoplift a package of bacon without getting caught in a Northern Virginia market. Says one old spy: It's a perfect metaphor for the sorry state of the CIA http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/041025/whispers/25whisplead.htm While I don't think this the place for political debate, I think the state of US intelligence services is something of interest to everyone on the list. I only hope this guy hasn't been training people. A.Lizard -- member The Internet Society (ISOC), The HTML Writers Guild. Feudal societies go broke. These top-heavy crony capitalists of the Enron ilk are nowhere near so good at business as they think they are. Bruce Sterling Personal Website http://www.ecis.com/~alizard business Website http://reptilelabs.com backup address (if ALL else fails) [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP 8.0 key available by request or keyserver. Download PGP from: http://www.pgpi.org for e-mail privacy. Disaster prep info: http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/y2k.html ***Looking for INTELLIGENT new technology public policy alternatives?*** http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/technology.html Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/UBhwlB/TM ~- TSCM-L Technical Security Mailing List In a multitude of counselors there is strength To subscribe to the TSCM-L mailing list visit: http://www.yahoogroups.com/community/TSCM-L It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Star Bucks that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking is a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. === TSKS Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TSCM-L/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: Airport insanity
-- On 18 Oct 2004 at 15:31, Tyler Durden wrote: Aside from that, your posts are completely saturated with the They're more evil than we are therefore it's OK for us to be fuckin them over logic. They are more evil that we are, as demonstrated by their propensity to kill all sorts of people, including each other, and including us. This forces us to do something violent. Imposing democracy on Iraq at gunpoint was probably a bad idea, but it was selected as the option that would raise the least objection. Any more effectual measure is going to piss you lot off even more. A more effectual measure and considerably less costly measure would have been to confiscate Iraq's and Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and ethnically cleanse all male muslims above the age of puberty from the oil bearing areas. This democracy stuff did not work in Haiti and things look considerably more difficult, and more expensive, in Iraq. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG sN+N7EZrY5IEjAANVirGQOOx7UYwBe9YPumiQ4uI 4PHJIbv0IpxzyH8CXPzWKj/497VCciWU9zZler22L
Re: Give peace a chance? NAH...
-- James A. Donald: War is dangerous to freedom, but we do not have a choice of peace. The question is where the war is to be fought - in America, or elsewhere. War within America will surely destroy freedom. Tyler Durden wrote: So. Why don't we see terrorist attacks in Sweden, or Switzerland, or Belgium or any other country that doesn't have any military or Imperliast presence in the middle east? Is this merely a coincidence? In fact we have seen Islamic terrorist attacks in Sweden and Switzerland, particularly Switzerland. Don't know about Belgium. Doubtless keeping US troops in Saudi Arabia was a bad idea, since it enabled Saudis to blame the evil of their government on the US, rather than themselves, but Bin Laden's indictment not only mentions US troops in Saudi Arabia, but also the reconquest of Spain, the massacre committed by the crusaders in Jerusalem, and the failure of Americans to obey Shariah law. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG /ocDcxC+cUo2DuIZWmQPcxCdoBKzBv64t/JGFD/n 4HbLfMXzuc00iivMRHO8xd9PCitZawSai9lJGyfi3
Re: Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money
At 5:27 PM -0400 10/19/04, R.A. Hettinga wrote: David Somebody named David, apparently... ;-) Shoot me now, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- On 19 Oct 2004 at 10:23, Tyler Durden wrote: Most Cypherpunks would agree that free markets are a good thing. Basically, if you leave people alone, they'll figure out how to meet the needs that are out in there and, in the process, get a few of the goodies available to us as vapors on this world. I assume you would agree to this. There are however some bad people, who want to conquer and rule. Some of them are nastier than others. Those people need to be killed. Killing some of them is regrettably controversial. Killing terrorists should not be controversial. More than that, some of the countries we've been kicked out or prevented from influencing have been modernizing rapidly, the most obvious example is China and Vietnam. Your history is back to front. China and Vietnam stagnated, until they invited capitalists back in, and promised they could get rich. Mean while the countries that we were not kicked out of for example Taiwan and South Korea, became rich. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG y7IV2I3RzvTRwezbeYDac49MQJFtu4pLd09CpaV1 4wwT8kfGpRCZY7aO/mhgeoOcaR9vYeYFWae8aMM/M
Re: Airport insanity
-- James A. Donald: Sadre protected himself with Iraqi women and young children as human shields, showing that he expected the Pentagon to show more concern for Iraqi lives than he did. Thomas Shaddack Pentagon protects their people by distance - being it by bombing from high altitude, or by using cruise missiles. Everybody uses the technology available to them. What's bad on it? Invariably, the side that uses the defensive measure - being it smart weapons[1] or human shields - classifies it as tactical, while the other side considers it cowardly. But no one would ever use human shields as a protection against Sadr. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG baNQWrpILKDhhFIBGXuMuSPmLUwgDjnVj7KGTDrs 4cKV4IqQITCwrJCTQCt5kQpfh5eiP+IX2EqGFdRA8
Re: Printers betray document secrets
On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 16:14, Ian Grigg wrote: R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/3753886.stm US scientists have discovered that every desktop printer has a signature style that it invisibly leaves on all the documents it produces. I don't think this is new - I'm pretty sure it was published about 6 or 7 years back as a technique. I think you're thinking of color copiers.
